Your Guide To The Awesome New Features Of iTunes 11

Apple recently released the 11th version of its popular media player iTunes, and its re-design and new features have gained lots of praises from critics of the older versions of iTunes who found the player bloated with features, and difficult to browse.

The new version is still a cross-platform Mac and PC player, and it contains nearly all the features of the previous version of iTunes. But the new re-design puts focus on the most used features of iTunes, while tucking other secondary features out of the way. You can now browse their iTunes library as well as parts of the iTunes Store at the same time, and a new MiniPlayer enables you to navigate iTunes using the same features found in the larger main window.

This guide will take you through the new features of iTunes 11, as well as the new Remote iOS app for the player.

From iTunes 10 To 11

After you download iTunes 11, it opens in the Albums view, presenting the contents of your entire music library. This view is not that different from the album, grid view of iTunes 10, except now the old, but once novel, cover flow feature has been removed.

The new user interface is one of the ways Apple is suggesting you navigate the new iTunes. However, if you want to get back to the old iTunes, you can do so by simply clicking on View > Show Sidebar, and you will discover that all your playlists and the old door to the iTunes Store and your mobile devices are still there.

But let’s get back to the new interface of iTunes (which requires you to hide the old sidebar to fully use the new interface). Notice alongside the Albums view of the new iTunes, you can view your iTunes library content from one of five other views - Songs, Artists, Genres, Videos and Playlists. The latter will reveal the traditional playlist sidebar that you’re familiar with. More about that later.

Notice also to the right of these views are two other buttons, one for accessing your supporting iDevices, such as the iPhone; and clicking the other one takes you out of your music library and opens the iTunes Store.

The New Interface

You can control all the main features of iTunes from this new interface. So now when you click on an album in your library, it reveals all the songs in that album. Notice also that the background color for the expanded album view matches the colors of the selected album itself.

You can play, shuffle, and rate songs in the expanded view, and if you want to view other songs and albums by a selected artist or group, you can click on the “In the Store” button and that content will open without taking you outside of your music library.

There’s also a pop-up menu that you can access by clicking on the arrow button in the expanded album view. This menu includes features for creating a genius playlist using a selected song, adding a song to the “Play Next” list (more about that later), locating the song in the iTunes Store, or linking to the selected song in Artist view.

Up Next

Another new handy feature in iTunes 11 is Up Next. When you’re playing a song in a playlist or album, clicking the Up Next button next to the player controls will show you just that, the songs or other iTunes items that are coming up next. There is also a little clock icon which shows a list of the most recent songs, podcasts, or TV shows, etc, that you have played. It looks as if that list continues to grow until you clear it.

Up Next is useful for say skipping to a different song in the list, but you can also select and re-arrange tracks in Up Next or delete a track from from the list.

Viewing & Creating Playlists

If you have created a lot of playlists in iTunes, you probably will want to browse and navigate your library in that view. Selecting the Playlist view will reveal its contents of a currently selected playlist, but it will also reveal a sidebar list of all your playlists, similar to how it was setup in iTunes 10. But this sidebar will not include your iOS devices or the link to iTunes Store – just your playlists.

In the Playlist view, you can use the View button on the upper-right to browse a selected playlist in the List, Grid, or Artist view. You can also click the Edit button to add songs to a playlist. Just drag the songs to the playlist. This new interface also makes it easier to edit your current Smart Playlists. When you select one of your Smart playlists, the Edit button will replace the Add To button in the upper-right.

When you want to create a new playlist or smart playlist, just click on the plus button at the bottom-left of the interface. You must be in the Playlist view to access this feature.

Notice also under the gear button, Apple also has resurrected the ability to burn a playlist to a CD, as well export the data of selected tracks.

When you’re in the expanded view of a selected album, you can also drag one or more songs to the right side of the iTunes interface, and add that content to an existing playlist or to one of your iDevices. The right sidebar will only appear when you drag a track to the right side of the interface.

The Mini Player

The other major new feature of iTunes 11 is the Mini Player. It mirrors the features of the main user interface of iTunes. You can switch to the MiniPlayer by clicking on Window > MiniPlayer, by using the keyboard shortcut, Option+Command+3; or you can click the MiniPlayer button on the top-right of the main interface.

When you hover your cursor over the MiniPlayer, it will reveal controls for playing, pausing, and skipping forward and backwards between tracks and other items.

You can also do searches using MiniPlayer, as well access the Up Next feature. The little arrow to the right of the currently playing track reveals the same menu items described above.

You can also access AirPlay in the MiniPlayer as well. To get back to the main iTunes interface, you need to click on the little square button on the left side of the MiniPlayer (see screenshot above).

Remote

Following the release of iTunes 11, Apple also released version 3.0 of its free iOS Remote app. The newest features in Remote provide expanded ways to browse and control all the shared iTunes libraries on your network.

It nearly mirrors all the new features of iTunes 11, including player controls, Up Next lists, and the ability to browse playlists, albums, genres and other content. As with the old Remote you can also use it to control your Apple TV. One significant difference between the iPad and the iPhone version of Remote is that you can’t rate songs in the iPhone version of Remote, which is kind of a bummer.

Overall, the new re-design and features of iTunes 11 feel cleaner and more user friendly. However, if you’re new to iTunes, or you have always found it bloated with too many features to wrap your head around, the update may not make such a huge difference to you.

But let us know what you think of iTunes 11. And for other iTunes related articles, see our directory here.

Bakari Chavanu

Will5herman

December 12, 2012

Aside from the Music part, I use iTunes for managing the Apps on my Devices. Under v10, when I am looking at the available apps to update, and I click on one of the icons, after reading about the changes, I could, right from that screen, choose to Update the app. Under v11, it only says downloaded, and I have to go back to the list of all the available apps to find it and click the update button. If I am lucky then the app is updated, sometimes it is a differnt app that gets updated instead because of how the screen is redrawn on my XP machine. I click on the screen where the button should be, but in the background iTunes contacts the store again, and redraws the screen, and then processes the click, which may not always be the same icon, if other apps have been clicked on, or the list changes.

Bakari Chavanu

December 12, 2012

Wow, it sounds like Apple made things worse in this regard. Thanks for pointing out this problem.

Félix S. De Jesús

Bakari Chavanu

Robb Thompson

December 12, 2012

I haven’t “bit” on the update yet, although I do like what the new iOS for my iPod touch did with Podcasts.

I’m probably different than a lot of iTunes users, in that I don’t use it for music, I use it for books on CD. A feature that I would truly love to see in some new version would be an option to “dupe next” when loading those CD’s. Books commonly take more than 10 and often up to 18 CD’s, and the “get info from Internet” for these CD’s is usually either non-existent or wrong. In a perfect world I could load all of the info once, then hit the aforementioned “dupe next” button, and all of the information would be copied into the next CD and the CD “sequence of” would be incremented by 1.

I’m not sure that what I see in your article will treat my audio book library very well.

William Fish

Daniel

December 13, 2012

On the old version of iTunes, when I downloaded a large number of songs at the same time, and I wanted to transfer them to my phone, it was very simple. I just clicked on the “Recently Added” folder and dragged each song on the list over to my iPhone. In iTunes 11, this doesn’t seem to be possible.

For some reason, the software won’t let me export songs from the “Recently Added” folder. I can only export from the much larger window that lists every single song I’ve got stored in iTunes. So in order to transfer a song to my phone, I have to search for it first, on a list of several thousand songs. If I’ve just downloaded five different songs by five different artists, the search can be very time-consuming. Is there a way around this problem that I’ve missed? Because I’m finding the new version of iTunes very frustrating.

Bakari Chavanu

December 15, 2012

Daniel, can you create a smart album that could assist you in what you need?

Bakari Chavanu

Jorge

December 15, 2012

How do you drag album artwork into this version of Itunes? Where did the genius reommended songs go?

Bakari Chavanu

December 15, 2012

You an add album art either through the selecting a song(s), right-clicking and selecting “Get Info”. Then select the Artwork button. Or you can just drag artwork to the thumbnail icon in the iTunes player.

keith

December 19, 2012

Usually the Add Artwork or Get Artwork features don’t work at all or provide completely wrong, irrelevant artwork for completely different albums from totally different genres and eras. WHen I attempt to add artwork iTunes either tries to add the selected artwork to EVERY album on iTUnes or none.
I found this out after selecting songs from one album to include artwork I scanned myself because iTunes was totally wrong. It then proceeded to change the artwork for every album in that genre. No undo possible.
ANy attempt to select an album and redo artwork means that the new artwork now replaces all album covers. THe only work around is to do each song individually which will be fun for 85 blues albums.
I despise the new unhelpful and utterly user unfriendly, unresponsive, ad-laden, app heavy piece of crap that iTunes has become as it continually subverts my choices and tries to impose its latest sales on me and prevent me from using iTunes the way I used to.

Michael Golrick

Thanks for the very useful article. Once again a software maker has given me “upgrades” and “enhancements” that make it harder to do what I want, and which take up more real estate on my screen.

Your hints on where to find the standard features that are no longer the default or are hidden was the most useful part of the article.

In my profession we talk about the “user experience” and trying to improve it. Why don’t software companies? They continue to give me things not only that I did not know I want, but often knew that I did not want.

Bakari Chavanu

Lauren

December 28, 2012

When I first opened itunes after the update it didn’t show the sidebar and I thought they did away with it altogether. I desperately missed the side bar view and I fumbled around totally hating new itunes until I read your instructions. A million times thank you!